They'll be opening brew pubs on Mars before that certainty would budge... and then it would be to complain about the availability of Bud Light.

Many a successful business plan has been spoken in jest.

Consider...

Ingredients (water, Barley, Hops) untouched by any Earth pollution.

Made by people who take pride in their work.

On Mars, 10gals of home brew (and a pleasant evening of oblivion for the staff of "Musk Villas") . On Earth 66 pints of "Authentic, Made on Mars Micro Brew" at $200+* a pint.

*Allowing for targeted shipping cost levels and a modest profit.

Ah, in another thread I was saying the Martian economy will be based on “million dollars in a shoebox” exports. I was thinking Martian jewellery but I like the idea of Martian single malt whiskey. Two bottles in a shoebox might come close, especially in a Martian glass bottle and shot glasses.

"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Going back to the original post in this thread, which talked about the risks SpaceX took to achieve reusability, I kind of see it the opposite. Musk's analogy: It's like there's a pallet with $ millions in cash falling through the sky. Why wouldn't they try to catch that? And now that SpaceX has shown it works, I think any company that isn't designing their next rocket for reusability is taking a huge risk.

But looking at SpaceX's business decisions in general, it's fair to say that they're very comfortable taking risks, and that's typical for this new group of billionaire entrepreneurs, as evidenced by Mark Zuckerberg's famous quote:

Quote from: Mark Zuckerberg

The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

Going back to the original post in this thread, which talked about the risks SpaceX took to achieve reusability, I kind of see it the opposite. Musk's analogy: It's like there's a pallet with $ millions in cash falling through the sky. Why wouldn't they try to catch that?

Speaking only about SpaceX, Musk's original motive was to get "stuff" to Mars, and not being able to do it as inexpensively as he needed. In startup-speak that is the "pain" that he experienced.

The "solution" to that "pain" was not based on a wild-assed guess, it was based on investigating the engineering and physics involved in launching mass to space, and then comparing that to the existing business models. And what Musk observed was that there was room for improvement on the product side (potential reusability), and room for improvement on the business side (i.e. customer price).

Existing providers rarely want to disrupt their own markets, and for the launch industry pre-SpaceX everyone was happy with the market segmentation.

Those conditions allowed SpaceX the opportunity to become dominant, but of course they had to be both good and lucky in being able to survive until they could get to that point. And it was far from assured that they would, so we're lucky they did.

Quote

And now that SpaceX has shown it works, I think any company that isn't designing their next rocket for reusability is taking a huge risk.

As I've been saying, the race is on to see who will be the LAST company to commit to reusable rockets. Because I think SpaceX has shown that the few protected markets for expendable launchers that are left won't be enough to allow for a dominate player in the near future.

Quote

But looking at SpaceX's business decisions in general, it's fair to say that they're very comfortable taking risks, and that's typical for this new group of billionaire entrepreneurs, as evidenced by Mark Zuckerberg's famous quote:

Quote from: Mark Zuckerberg

The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

Zuckerberg is talking about taking risks once you are already successful, which is different than what Elon Musk did to start SpaceX.

As to what SpaceX does today, maybe a different way to say it is that they are very good at taking calculated risks, in that they've done their homework and determined that what they could do is possible, and they are OK with failure on their way to proving that it was inevitable.